Users of telephony services occasionally experience disruptions to their conversations due to network events such as failovers and other transitory service failures where calls in progress are dropped. These failovers can be due to regular maintenance of network elements or caused by unrecoverable failures in network elements. These events although rare can cause a great deal of frustration to residential users and can seriously impact business users who may lose valuable sales as a result of cut off calls. After such an event, users are forced to hang up, and reconnect to the terminating endpoint thereby costing them both time and money.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and apparatus for maintaining active calls during failover of network elements in a packet network, e.g., a VoIP network.